


The Lake of Walking Mists

by Grayswandir (gothic_gray)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:01:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26769163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gothic_gray/pseuds/Grayswandir
Summary: An archeologist discovers an ancient shrine in the jungle, and with it a god who has been forgotten by, but has not yet forgotten, mankind.(Written for the Shipoween Original Works prompt "Explorer/Forgotten Deity of a Long Lost Shrine." Happy Halloween!)
Relationships: Explorer/Forgotten Deity of a Long Lost Shrine
Comments: 7
Kudos: 4
Collections: Shipoween 2020 - The Halloween Ship Exchange!





	The Lake of Walking Mists

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skvadern](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skvadern/gifts).



It was on a late afternoon in the autumn of 1929 that Omar Plácido Espinosa Ortiz found himself descending, step by cautious step, into the densely-forested basin of the Laguna de las Nieblas Andantes. The high canopy of corozo palms and wild climbing roots of liana overhead filtered sunlight down into deep shade. On the damp root-knotted earth nothing moved except the shivering light, but above, a wind was rising. Omar Plácido could no longer hear his own footsteps over the roar that was the thrashing of the great palms. 

He’d been seeking this place for fourteen years. A single pocket-journal, buried among the archives of the Argentine National Library, marked it out as an ancient site at which certain stone obelisks of unknown origin had been stumbled upon, then already in ruins, by a lost party of Capuchin missionaries three centuries earlier. Records of the local topography, however, were infuriatingly imprecise, and after his first three summers of fruitless expeditions into the jungles southeast of Lábrea, Omar Plácido had received from his university a notice of termination of funding. The department director had told him that any further exploration would have to be conducted without the support of a research team, on his own private initiative, and on his own time. 

There had been nothing he could say. The undergrowth in this region had a way of consuming every lingering vestige of human memory, and he knew that to recover the paths to those strange stone pillars after so long might very well be a forgone hope. Yet year after year, he returned. 

Today his course had wound further south than before, carrying him into deeper and denser jungle. He had chopped his slow way around coiling roots and webs of tenacious vine, watching as the faint glimmers of sunlight between the trees reached the zenith and gradually began to edge toward the west. He had been on the point of turning back when he had felt, quite suddenly, the ground sharply sloping, dipping away beneath him. He stood on the lip of a hollow that sunk down, deep into low-lying jungle mists. It was the sign he had been waiting for. 

He climbed down through the trees and listened to the strange rising violence of the wind. After a while he began to believe he could also hear other, stranger sounds, as of watchful movement. There were low rattlings and a distant chatter like the cackling of a single mad bird, and a gentle susurrus like the slippery noise of something gliding under wet mulch. Omar Plácido kept his machete raised, but he continued his descent. 

As the ground began to level out, the trees grew sparser, and the vines receded. Hazy afternoon light broke through the high foliage, down to an earth wrapped in mist. The mist swirled around his ankles like rippling water as he climbed down and down, into the base of the depression. There, the jungle opened out into a foggy clearing, in the midst of which Omar Plácido could discern the outline of a wide, still lake. Towering ceiba trees, soaring to half the height of Giza’s pyramids, spread their vast branches out over the clearing as if reaching to close it in; yet the fog lay dense enough that on the surface of the water, the ancient ceibas cast no reflection. 

Omar Plácido stood at the forest’s edge and considered this strange and rather eerie sight. He wondered why the line of the trees did not extend nearer to the lake shore. A thick growth of grasses showed that the soil was neither marshy nor over-rich in sediment, as the sketches in the Spanish friars’ journal had led him to suppose. Perhaps there was something else in the soil, or in the water, that kept the trees at bay. 

For an instant, a sharp rustling seemed to come from many directions at once. Omar Plácido turned and scanned the trees with watchful eyes, backing slowly away toward the lake. He had met dangers in the jungle before, but the sounds that seemed to have been following him ever since he’d stepped into the ring of the basin were unlike anything he could name. He had seen no living thing for the stretch of at least half a mile, and despite the rustling and the wind, the forest lay preternaturally still. 

The ground beneath him, at least, was firm, though damp. A muck of decaying leaves clung to his boots. After watching the forest for a moment more, he turned again, and headed down to the hollow of the lake. 

Along the shallow bank, he could see that the water was clear. No streams flowed out of it, yet despite the rainy climate, it was not the black tannic water of a sink lake. There must, then, have been deep caverns under the water, an outlet to underground rivers winding far below the forest floor. _Cryptorheism_ , that had been called, in a recent paper by the French scholar Emmanuel de Martonne: _a hidden flow_. The abstraction of the Greek name was somehow steadying. It placed a certain psychological distance, Omar Plácido thought, between himself and the unfathomed, lightless depths on whose brink he now felt that he stood. 

Something strange was happening. The mist was flowing, turning around his ankles and winding away, like a current running to the lake’s western shore. It seemed almost to be pulling him. He walked along the waterside, following the strange swirling eddies of cloud, until a sudden vision stopped him in his tracks. After the briefest pause he started forward again, more quickly, as though afraid that what he saw would vanish with the parting fog. 

A monument stood on a raised stone platform at the edge of the lake, its lowest steps slightly submerged. The remains of several crumbled pillars jutted around the platform’s base, suggesting that a roof had once shielded it from above, though no trace of that structure remained. A large, white-stone monolith occupied the center of the platform. From where he stood, Omar Plácido could see that the stone was massive, taller and broader than a man, and intricately wrought; but through the haze he could not guess at the extent of its preservation or decay. 

He stepped to the water’s edge, and seemed to feel the lake rise imperceptibly to meet the toes of his boots. The mist was coaxing him forward. He hooked his machete through his belt and waded out, ankle-deep in the shallows, then stepped up to set one foot against the first stone step that rose above the water. He tested his weight against it. It was solid. 

Overhead, the trees shook wildly, and a burst of strange sounds rustled through the forest again. Omar Plácido turned, half expecting to see a cloud of birds taking sudden flight: the omen of a storm. But there was only the mysterious rustling, and far above, the high branches shivering in the wind. 

He climbed up the steps to the stone platform, and for a long moment, he forgot to breathe. 

Fourteen years he had sought this place. He could not tell what emotion he felt now, standing before the moss-encrusted altar at the shrine of this unknown and clearly long-forgotten god, but the sensation was enough almost to stop his heart. A step beyond the altar, the central icon loomed, densely carved with images very like to those he had seen copied in the margins of the friars’ pocket-book. They were not, however, the same. That book had described weird obelisks and columns along the lakeside, but it made no mention of this shrine. Perhaps the friars had come to the lake from the opposite shore. At any distance, the white-stone structure would have been easy to miss in the fog. 

The central icon had four faces, gazing toward the north, the south, the west, and the east. Each face was the same, and equally monstrous: horned, serpent-scaled, with six eyes and a protruding tongue that split into a dozen writhing snake-heads, some of which had broken away. The chipped remnants of many clawed scorpion-tails reared upward from the base, like the myriad arms of a Hindu icon. Those claws that still remained intact looked as if they had once been blade-sharp, though long years had weathered them to dullness. Every stylized rope of scaly flesh was carved exquisitely, precisely, as by a most delicate and reverent hand. 

It looked older than the ruins of the Tilacra that had earned Juan Ambrosetti his great name. Perhaps it was older even than the ancient stonework that Alfonso Caso had discovered at Mitla, or the shrines that Leopoldo Batres had excavated in Monte Albán. It seemed to belong to another world. 

Omar Plácido found himself reaching out to touch the stone with his fingers. It was damp and slightly clammy in the sweating jungle air, slippery yet jagged, like the armored flesh of a reptile. He stroked with two fingers the head of one of the small, radial serpents projecting from the mouth of the icon’s western face. The mist seemed to be gathering around him, and when he turned, feeling suddenly as if something were watching, he found he could no longer see the forest. He wondered whether his hand was trembling, or whether it was the stone that was vibrating, very softly, under his touch. 

He was not sure what it was that compelled him to kneel, but when he did, he heard the lake water swell and rush against the shore like a tide. 

Something was there. He felt certain that something was there with him, in that forsaken place, although the only sounds were water and wind. The mist seemed to be reaching for him, tasting him with silent white tendrils, curious and patient. Below, the water was moving now, very softly, lapping against the stone steps. As if by instinct, his hand had found the hilt of his machete, and he gripped onto it like a lifeline, but there was no one to draw it against. He felt his heart in his throat hammering a violent staccato, while all around, the gentle, breathing pressure of the vaporous air continued to close steadily in. 

Maybe he could have retreated back down the steps to the shore. He didn’t try. The soft, strange breathing of the lake-fog already seemed not to be outside him any longer, but inside. A haze had come over his mind, as if the mist had penetrated flesh and bone to reach his consciousness and coil searchingly, silently into the recesses of thought. He felt as though some question was being asked of him—some question in the inarticulate language of dreams, wordless and yet immanently present. That questing presence seemed to wish to know who, or what, Omar Plácido was. 

Between panicked breaths, grappling for a handhold on his wavering reality, he considered the question, and found that he was not sure how to answer. 

He was a man. He was Omar Plácido Espinosa Ortiz. He had been born on All Saints’ Day in the Year of Our Lord 1887, and though he could trace his lineage back only three generations before it receded beyond the veil of unwritten history, he knew that his father’s family had been glass-blowers before they came to Santa Fe, and that his mother’s grandfather had crossed the Andes with José San Martín. For himself, he had lived, until now, an uneventful life. He had idled away his youth reading folktales, and as a young professor had made modest contributions to the field of Archeology, teaching for ten years in Buenos Aires and then for five more in La Plata. He had served for a time as secretary to the Argentine Geographical Institute, and was now honored with the post of assistant curator of the distinguished La Plata Museum. But he was certain that none of these qualifications would serve to recommend him to the one who now pressed him for something more elemental, more vital, more intimate than mere biography, more primary even than the face his mirror showed him every morning, or the shape of his name. 

The question continued to wind into and through him like blind fingers mapping him from within. Aloud, into the turning fog, he said: 

“My name is Omar Plácido Espinosa Ortiz.” 

Nothing changed. He held his breath for a moment, and then continued: 

“I have been looking for you.” 

He said, “May I ask—” 

But he did not have to ask. An answer was already there: not a linear unfolding but a nebulous, imageless impression, like the sudden welling-up of many memories out of some deep and ancient place. His thoughts turned every way at once, seeking some key to unlock this interior language and translate it, if not into words, at least into feelings he could understand. He sensed great age, long solitude, vast power, and an opening-in that seemed to be both invitation and command. There was a wildness, a weirdness, a latent dangerous volatility, a slow crumbling decline that felt a little like madness, and the stone-heavy weight of undiminishing sorrow. Among these, there were some emotions so alien, and some impressions so strange, that Omar Plácido could not bring them into focus to give them names. 

He sensed the shape of a watery coolness glittering over cold still depths. He thought of the statue, scaled and slippery and damp. 

“The shrine of the lake god,” he said. It was not a question. The presence inside him had already confirmed his guess before he spoke, with a pressure like the urgent, wordless _yes_ of an answering kiss. 

Omar Plácido felt extremely strange. Somewhere out beyond the dense, slow-churning fog, he could hear the forest stirring again, more loudly and more ominously than before, as if beasts of monstrous size were slowly lumbering out from the trees. When he turned to look behind him, however, he could see nothing through the white fog except the swaying of the high branches against a darkening sky. 

He turned back to look at the statue of the god. In the changing light and shadow filtering in through the mist, the stone looked alive. It did not move, but some deep consciousness seemed to animate it from within, and its six wild, round eyes fixed Omar Plácido with a gaze that bored into some secret part of him that was as immutable and incommunicable as the god in the stone. 

He felt reverent. He felt intimately, profoundly _seen_. 

Then he felt a new pressure, urging him back to his feet and pulling him forward, around the four-faced monolith toward the far side of the platform, where steps led down into the lake. 

He knew that to resist would be in vain, but nevertheless, for a long while, he did not move. He thought of cold rivers running down into the dark stone channels under the earth, down under thousand-year rootbeds, and he wondered what sacrifices had once been made at the altar of the Lake God. Perhaps the mind of the god did not understand his fear, because the only answer that came was a flood of white mist pouring out from the platform down the steps to the water, and a firm, steady pull on his body, urging him to follow. 

It was almost an affectionate pressure, potent, unrelenting, but patient, as if willing to gentle and tame him into submission like some wild thing captured in a snare, struggling foolishly and to his own detriment. He tried once to step back, but like a constriction of snake-coils the god’s power stilled and held him, and then again pressed him forward. 

The forest was growing dark now, and the sounds from the trees seemed closer. Perhaps the platform on the lake somehow amplified sound in this mysterious clearing. Judging by what he now heard, Omar Plácido could almost have imagined that the forest itself had crept nearer to the shore. 

He had been looking for this place for fourteen years, but the Lake God had been waiting for centuries, or maybe much longer, to feel again the once-familiar pulse of human fear and human awe. It may have been that in all the ages since the god’s last worshippers departed the world, Omar Plácido’s hand had been the first to touch that ancient and beautiful relief of stone, recalling it to its ancient purpose and summoning its spirit from long sleep. Now, it wanted a dedication. 

And so, gradually, Omar Plácido ceased to resist. He let the will of the god draw him forward, as if carried in the arms of the mist. He did not think of the long jungle path back to Lábrea, which he supposed he would not walk again, or of the home in La Plata to which he no longer expected to return. He would not be the first man to disappear in these wilds. Just four years past, three men had vanished crossing the Upper Xingu on the trail of a lost ancient city, and now perhaps Omar Plácido would come to the same end. Perhaps he had completed the journey of his life, here in this sacred and hidden vale where even gods could be forgotten. 

He walked to the edge of the platform and down the steps to the lake, while the water lashed eagerly at the stones, beckoning him on. When he bent to dip his hands down through the veil of mist, he felt the water swell to meet and envelop them. Then, with a strangely passive resolve, he stood again, and looked back at the statue whose eastern face now watched him with its many eyes, and with the eyes of many delicately writhing serpent tongues. 

He shrugged the pack from his shoulders, drew the machete from his belt, and began, piece by piece, to place his clothing on the white stone steps. He set his boots down, then his jacket, his hat, the scarf that kept mosquitoes from his throat. He stripped his trousers down, unbuttoned his shirt, adding each item to the pile until he stood perfectly bare, there in the dark of the jungle sunset, with mist still pooling around his ankles. 

The wild, thrashing sound of the wind battering the great trees in the dark no longer deeply disturbed him. He would be one with the Lake God, as the Lake God desired. What havoc the wind wrought in the trees was no longer any of his concern. 

In the gathering twilight, he descended the steps into the lake, feeling currents of cool water eddy around his knees, his thighs, his waist. When he stood shoulder-deep in the mystery of that dark water, he felt the god’s will coil around him again, holding and steadying him there, while the slow currents caressed and explored him, as though he, too, were a site of deep mysteries. 

Fourteen years had brought him here. He had no regrets. He had never loved anything as he now, in this moment, suddenly felt he loved the wild-eyed serpent-god of the lake of mists. His awe was the gift he had brought, and the more achingly it welled up in his breast, the more fiercely the waters embraced him. He thought, too, that at the touch of the water, the Lake God’s mind had become more legible, more rich with returning memories, more urgent to possess. Into the long, bitter loneliness that now lay open to him, Omar Plácido could not give enough of himself. 

Something, meanwhile, was happening on the shore. Although the mists had withdrawn, it was now too dark for him to see what it was that was moving — but something was moving, he was sure. The whole jungle, indeed, seemed to be moving, creaking and whispering, as though the trees themselves were closing in on the lakefront, pushing to reclaim the hollow where the Lake God reigned. Amid the continuous low rustling there was the sound of water rushing shoreward, surging like a tide out from the center of the lake. But though he could feel the currents moving around him, Omar Plácido remained suspended beside the platform, as though tethered invisibly on what he felt sure was the last solid stone step on the brink of the lake’s oblivion. 

The sounds grew louder and stranger, shadows clashed, and under him the stone platform trembled. Then came a flash like lightning, and in the next moment, Omar Plácido felt himself pulled under. 

He let it happen. There in the deep water, he felt his body react as if it were somewhere outside him: sheer animal panic gripped his chest and throat as he struggled for air, and his limbs thrashed wildly, yet consciously he did not feel afraid. 

After that, through the long jungle night, he slept, and was not conscious of anything at all. 

\+ + +

When Omar Plácido woke, he was lying on the damp stone steps of the monument’s eastern face. The mists had receded, but the water seemed to be lapping at his feet, gently, as if to rouse him. 

He had not drowned after all. He had washed up at the base of the shrine, where he supposed he must have lain for most of the night. Despite the humid atmosphere, his body was mostly dry. He rose and began to pull his clothes back on. 

Some trace of the Lake God’s presence still seemed to be lingering in him, but the feelings of power and urgency had subsided, as had the flood of deep memory that had surged into him the night before as he’d descended, a willing offering, into the water. For a long time, as he slowly and pensively dressed, he felt almost nothing. No coils of white mist clung against his skin, no pressure constrained his movement, no communication of shapeless thought swelled up into his mind. It was not until he had taken a long drink from his canteen and hefted his pack onto his shoulders that a thought, unexpectedly articulate, touched him. 

_Omar Plácido Espinosa Ortiz_ , said the voice of the god — a low, clear, undulant voice that sounded in Omar Plácido’s mind like light ripples over a deep, cool stillness. Perhaps in the course of their long night’s communion, the god’s old memories of human language had returned. Or perhaps it was Omar Plácido who had at last unlocked the grammar of the Lake God’s mind. 

The voice said: 

_Go. Go now. Do not return._

Omar Plácido did not trouble to ask, aloud or even silently, the question that was in his mind. He let the god perceive it in its naked form, with all the uncertain and mingled emotions that attended it. 

_I have warded them off_ , the voice answered him. 

_For now._

Omar Plácido felt suddenly troubled. On an impulse that he could not explain, he approached the central monolith, moving around from the east and examining each side anxiously, until he came around to the west side, where the icon faced the forest. What he saw drew a gasp from his lips, and his machete clattered to the stone out of his hand. The western face of the statue was shattered. 

The horns were broken, the stone jaw cracked, and the many serpent tongues lay strewn over the pedestal among scaly shards like crushed pottery. The long, clawed tails that had extended their battle-ready hooks toward the west had been destroyed so utterly that their remains no longer gave any clues to their original shape. The six eyes that had penetrated Omar Plácido so deeply the night before now looked out, still round and wild and dangerous, as if from behind the plaster of a broken mask. 

Omar Plácido turned. The jungle was silent, and the trees were still, but some of them, too, wore scars, and the muddy earth was ravaged all around the clearing, from the shore to the line of the trees. Vast swathes of ceiba branches lay scattered over the ground, and palm fans floated, very still, on the misty surface of the lake. 

The voice said: 

_The old gods have turned. It is long since man walked safely here._

In Omar Plácido’s mind, the clashing shadows that he now remembered took on new and terrible shapes. Something had been after him in the jungle, from the moment he’d begun his descent down to the basin. Something had wanted him, and had come to claim him once night fell, but could not reach him. The Lake God had enfolded him in a shroud of water and mist, and held him back while battle raged. 

He turned to the statue, and once more reached out to touch the stone face, tracing with his fingertips the broken edges of fangs and tongues. He wondered what had become of the worshippers of this once-powerful, now ruined god, which was so willing to be loved and to protect. 

He wondered what other, wilder gods dwelt in this place, and what they wanted. He could still feel, even now, how the Lake God longed for him, and for the taste of his wonder, his fear, his prostrated devotion. In the water, he had felt that longing so deeply that he’d believed the god would draw him into an eternal embrace, charging to his account, as it were, the long-unpaid debt of an altar bare of offerings for many an age. He had even been ready to become that offering. As a mere man, he felt he had no right to deny so ancient and primordial a need. 

_Go_ , said the Lake God again. _Do not return._

Omar Plácido knelt, and bowed his head. The mist rippled over him, flowing away down the steps to the shore and into the trees, toward the north. He took his machete up from among the rubble on the platform, and turned to go. 

From the edge of the forest, where the trees were still sparse, he stopped to look back, as the myths always warn that one should never do. The lake had fallen still, a placid glass sheet reflecting soft, white haze. The stone shrine was now almost invisible on the lakeshore, as if obscured by some mysterious trick of the light. For the moment, the jungle, too, was still. No ominous rattling shuddered through the trees, and even the highest boughs shook only faintly in the wind. Omar Plácido Espinosa Ortiz turned his steps into the forest and began the climb, up and up, toward the path back to Lábrea, the winding Purus, and the civilized world. 

The last trails of mist curled longingly after him as he went. Then they slowly receded, back into the still cold depths of the Laguna de las Nieblas Andantes.


End file.
